Advanced Computing

The High Performance Computing (HPC) research infrastructure was established in Monash University Malaysia to support research, providing powerful computing services that can reduce computing jobs taking several days to just a few hours.

It is composed of one master node (2×8 Core E5-2650 v2, 48GB Memory), twelve compute nodes (2×8 Core E5-2650 v2, 256GB Memory) with a total of 192 processor cores, and is efficiently coupled with a disk storage system of 115 TB in capacity.

The infrastructure aims to support multidisciplinary research in the natural and social sciences such business, medicine, pharmacy, information technology and engineering.

It is currently used for research in the (but not limited to) following fields of study, i.e., from computer vision, image processing, optical network, machine learning, pattern recognition, combustion, turbulent flow, nanomaterials, genomes analysis, to disease association studies.

Getting Started

Introduction

As a new user, when you registered a HPC account, the first thing you want to know may include one or more of the following:

How can you login and what is the best ways to access the host remotely?

How to transfer files between the host and your PC or another Unix system in your lab?

After you login to one of the host, which directories can you use to run your jobs?

What are the batch LSF queues for running long hours computing jobs?

This introductory guide is to answer those questions. Together with the relevant links provided, we hope that it will help you to get started smoothly.

At HPC, all systems are managed by the LSF (load sharing facility). With the LSF commands, you can submit your jobs to different hosts with different features, capabilities and limitations. You can monitor your jobs while they are running or check the load and status of each host to chose your submission queues and hosts. Therefore, before you start your work, do check the User Guide in HPC home page or read the man pages (type man followed by the command) for different commands to familiarize yourself with LSF commands and the queues and hosts used in the LSF environment. The recommendation is to submit all compute intensive jobs as batch jobs through the LSF.

Some users are new to the Linux operating system. To learn more about Linux, you can read books on Linux; or simply type a “linux commands” in the internet search engines to search, you will get dozens of web pages with listing and explanation of Linux commands. A compiled list of the Linux commands is also available here for your reference, click here to download.